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anonymous

Maybe nuclear power isn't so bad after all - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

energy layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 13 May 10 - Cached
  • Shortly after the cold war ended, the U.S. started buying warheads from Russia and converting the weapons-grade uranium into fuel suitable for commercial reactors.
  • spent fuel rods from a typical plant cannot easily be converted into weapons-grade explosives.
  • Terrorists cannot easily blow up nuclear plants to create dirty bombs.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Many countries that have nuclear power plants do not possess weapons. And almost every country that has nuclear weapons today acquired them before acquiring nuclear reactors.
  • Nuclear energy is cheaper as well as cleaner than fossil fuels.
  • anonymous on 13 May 10
     
    By John Horgan (guest contributor) in Scientific American on May 11, 2010.
anonymous

Are predictions of endless war self-fulfilling? - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

geopolitics predictions

shared by anonymous on 20 May 10 - Cached
  • The implicit assumption of the entire conference was that there will always be wars.
  • "No," Mansoor replied immediately when I asked him if he thought international war would ever end, as some scholars have recently proposed. He acknowledged that since World War II there have been relatively few international wars and no wars between major powers (although of course the U.S. and the Soviet Union fought through proxies). But he likened our era to the century of relative calm following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.
  • There are many more democracies in the world now, and democracies rarely fight against each other (although they obviously fight against non-democracies, as Mansoor pointed out). Moreover, modern media rub our noses in war's ugliness as never before.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • What bothers me most about Mansoor's vision of the future is its potential to be self-fulfilling.
  • anonymous on 20 May 10
     
    By John Horgan at Scientific American on May 19, 2010
anonymous

Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and evil? - 0 views

www.boingboing.net/...can-jared-loughner-h.html

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Feeney's piece is worth reading in its entirety, as is Beyond Good and Evil. It's a lot to sum up in a blog post, but Nietzsche basically says there are two types of moral systems: master-morality and slave-morality. His best summary is section 260. In master-morality, the ruling class makes the rules and thus considers itself noble, while in slave morality, there is a suspicion of those in power and in what they consider "good."
  • In other words, it's all a big misunderstanding based on your point of view, kind of like how you might see Palin as evil when your neighbor sees her as good.
  • What's interesting in relation to mass murders like the Tucson incident is that people can rationalize their way into an internally consistent logic that normalizes their thoughts and actions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When Giffords gave an apparently unacceptable response to Loughner's obtuse question about language not being real, she seems to have caused him some cognitive dissonance. He apparently expected her to recognize his intellectual superiority, and when she didn't, he became fixated on what he saw as a slight that threw his self-assessment into question.
  • Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence, rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations, participation in economies of violence, unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That's not evil. It's simply a tragic nexus of human flaws that can culminate in what is too easily dismissed as evil.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 11
     
    "Nietzsche is frequently a fave of angry young men who might qualify as what Pesco called confident dumb people. Nietzsche works well for the modern kook with web-induced attention deficits: The fourth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is a series of 122 Twitter-length aphorisms, and his work is snarky and occasionally humorous. Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil to criticize earlier philosophers who made assumptions about morality based on pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about "evil." Below I discuss why we need to steal Nietzsche back from these people, and I look at a couple of other writers who have examined what gets called "evil" and have attempted to explain it in more nuanced and rational terms."
anonymous

Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis - 0 views

www.wired.com/...st_thompson_short_long

criticalthinking media internet

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 11 - Cached
  • The long take is the opposite: It’s a deeply considered report and analysis, and it often takes weeks, months, or years to produce. It used to be that only traditional media, like magazines or documentaries or books, delivered the long take. But now, some of the most in-depth stuff I read comes from academics or businesspeople penning big blog essays, Dexter fans writing 5,000-word exegeses of the show, and nonprofits like the Pew Charitable Trusts producing exhaustively researched reports on American life.
  • The real loser here is the middle take.
  • This is what the weeklies like Time and Newsweek have historically offered: reportage and essays produced a few days after major events, with a bit of analysis sprinkled on top. They’re neither fast enough to be conversational nor slow enough to be truly deep. The Internet has essentially demonstrated how unsatisfying that sort of thinking can be.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 11
     
    "We're often told that the Internet has destroyed people's patience for long, well-thought-out arguments. After all, the ascendant discussions of our day are text messages, tweets, and status updates. The popularity of this endless fire hose of teensy utterances means we've lost our appetite for consuming-and creating-slower, reasoned contemplation. Right? I'm not so sure. In fact, I think something much more complex and interesting is happening: The torrent of short-form thinking is actually a catalyst for more long-form meditation."
anonymous

Mideast Turmoil: A Forecast Compilation - 0 views

www.futureatlas.com/...turmoil-a-forecast-compilation

geopolitics egypt

shared by anonymous on 31 Jan 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 31 Jan 11
     
    "This is a roundup of some of the fast-accumulating forecasts for Egypt and the Middle East, particularly those taking a longer view (including some of my own)."
anonymous

Tools Never Die, the Finale - 0 views

www.npr.org/...tools-never-die-the-finale

shared by anonymous on 24 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • So what Kevin found is not exactly what I asked him to find; the original tool is no longer being made, but the idea, the concept, lives on in new, adaptive forms. Was that our bet? "Remember," he wrote me a little defensively," I did not say 'no technological device' but rather 'no species of technology' [has disappeared] so my emphasis is on the underlying technology rather than the physical device."
  • But the deeper lesson of this whole exercise is that — to a degree I didn't appreciate until Kevin forced me to look — technology does indeed persist. Tools, machines, they change, they adapt, they morph, but they continue to be made. I hadn't noticed this tenaciousness before.
  • Kevin would go further. He has a radical notion, and he talks about it in his book What Technology Wants. He says most living things eventually go extinct. But technology, perhaps, is immortal.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Also when comparing tools to life, the time scales are ridiculously different. Trilobites ranged the Earth for 270 million years. The Paleolithic axe is an infant by comparison, merely 100,000 years old. The homo sapiens who made that axe are only a 200,000 years old. Who's to say that our ideas won't vanish long before the trilobites did?
  • Ideas, what do they use? Not chemicals. Richard Dawkins says they leap from, "brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation." People see a new invention, then they tell friends about it, or they put it onto a cave wall, papyrus, into song, or a book, newspaper, radio, TV, movies, poems, the internet. That way, the invention can be stored and copied.
  • Or is it possible that technology is inherently persistant, that it just won't be thrown out? That's what Kevin is suggesting. That's "What Technology Wants." It "wants" to be copied, to last. I find this idea a bit too mystical for my tastes.
  • "I don't know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora...Who's in charge, according to this vision — we or our memes?
  • anonymous on 24 Feb 11
     
    "A few weeks ago, Kevin, founding editor of Wired Magazine and world-class gadget geek, made me this bet: I bet, he said, "there is no species of technology that's gone globally extinct on this planet." By which he meant - or I took him to mean - there is no tool, no invention ever manufactured by humans that isn't still being made new today."
anonymous

Lessons from the long tail of improbable disaster - 2 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ABht0Ja_story.html

long now long term planning systems

shared by anonymous on 18 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The troubles in northern Japan, for example, are beginning to ripple through global supply chains, creating bottlenecks and shortages in dozens of industries. The way globalization increases economic efficiency is by leveraging the advantages of scale and specialization. Yet the bigger and more concentrated production becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes to disruption.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      The principle argument in favor of broadly progressive economic policies. The thinking goes: Capitalism is focused squarely on efficiency, therefore, calamities wreak more havoc on supply chains because there is no 'buffer' to absorb the chain's redirection.
  • Many scholars
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      Citation, please? I realize it's a blog, and I'd probably balk if people asked for citations for every one of my (sometimes boneheaded) assertions. However, knowing (just a little) where the criticism is coming from is highly useful.
  • more attention must be paid to the extra risks that come with all the advantages of modern life. There may be a significant cost involved in preventing low-probability disasters, or having sufficient infrastructure to deal with them when they cannot be prevented.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      Add to that the fact that, even with tons of safeguards, disasters will still happen. That's life, once again, not conforming to our numerical expectations. It's impossible to properly *gauge* the value of a safeguard. We can't build something, flood it, build it some other way, flood it again, ad nauseum.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If it seems that the frequency and size of calamities have been picking up in recent years, it’s only because they probably have.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      I call 'observer bias' on this one. While expanding human settlement will, indeed, drive up instances of disasters, my supposition is that our communications technology gives a false impression of increased occurrences.
  • What all of these have in common is that they are all low-probability, high-impact events — the “long-tail” phenomenon, to use the jargon of risk modelers
  • Although we observe that calamities happen, we assume that they won’t happen to us, or they won’t happen again.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      Back in Mpls, I remember reading about people who bought property on 50-year flood plains and then were shocked - shocked - that a flood wiped out their home.
  • Part of the problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. The other part is that small miscalculations of probabilities can have large effects on outcomes when dealing with long periods of time.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Mar 11
       
      These are two really great characterizations of the relevant cognitive shortcomings.
  • anonymous on 18 Mar 11
     
    "What all of these have in common is that they are all low-probability, high-impact events - the "long-tail" phenomenon, to use the jargon of risk modelers, referring to the far ends of the traditional bell curve of probabilities, or "black swans," to use the metaphor popularized by former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb."
anonymous

5 Things They Never Told Us - 0 views

www.cracked.com/...5-things-they-never-told-us

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 11 - Cached
  • #5.You Don't Become An Adult, You Just Suddenly Are One
  • There's no class or test or paperwork to sign. One day you just realize you're a person who pays bills. You're a person who signs up for a club card at your local grocery store because, "Oh, I might as well, I'm there so often." You're a person who gradually is getting less and less familiar with whatever's going on in pop music. You can vote and rent a car and get married and have kids, and it's not weird, it's normal.You're an adult, and no one told you.
  • Remember when you were a kid and you saw adults as all-knowing authority figures who had shit figured out? As the people who were allowed to tell you what to do and make rules, because they were the ones who were running the world? That's what kids think when they see you, even though you're an idiot.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • #4.Almost Everything You're Doing is Absolutely Meaningless
  • The only skills you really need to learn in high school and college are how to socialize and be a functioning human in society, because that's the only thing you'll be consistently doing for the rest of your life.
  • College is important, but what you study? Not so much. Focus on learning how to be a human, and focus on networking and meeting the right people, because they are much better at hiring you than your GPA is. Professors and Deans and your parents will stress that your grades are important, but I guarantee you that, as long as they were good at their job, no one in the history of time has ever been fired because of their GPA.
  • You'll Never Have as Much Time, Energy, Or Excuses For Doing Dumb Shit Than When You're 14
  • At 14, you're not legally allowed to work in most states, school is a pointless breeze and you have nothing to be stressed about because you're not paying bills or fighting in a war and no one depends on you for anything. You just have boundless energy, and a stupid amount of free time and no accountability whatsoever.
  • anonymous on 25 Mar 11
     
    "Given the opportunity, there are probably a lot of tiny, superficial things you say to your fourteen-year-old self, (Get a haircut; Stop being a smartass; Maybe try not masturbating for, like, a night, and see what that does to the amount of free time you have). Small things you wish you'd known, because they would've made middle school, high school and whatever comes after slightly easier. There are also much bigger things, things about life and growing up that someone damn sure should've told you about."
anonymous

Ten Reasons We Are Seeing An Excess of Lists of Ten Things We Should Know - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...s-of-ten-things-we-should-know

shared by anonymous on 17 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Lately I’ve noticed lots of articles with titles that are variations of “Ten Things You Should Know About X.”
  • 1. We don’t have time to read anymore.
  • 2. Ten is close to the approximate size of our working memory.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 3. Since writers can’t make a living any more, we are sliding into an era of bullet point-ism.
  • 4. In many cases, there’s more than ten things that you should know, or fewer than ten things that you should know.
  • 5. It’s a way for pentadactyl animals to feel superior to unidactyl animals.
  • 6. At this point in the list, with four more to go, we enter the fat and boring midsection of the list of top ten things you should know about lists of ten things. It’s basically not remembered, so there’s really no point in putting anything here. Ditto for 7, and 8.
  • 9. Because of the well documented recency effect, it’s time to start having content in our list of ten things again.
  • 10. If we’ve maintained our concentration to this point in the list, we will be rewarded with a bit of humorous fluff that helps bind some of our anxiety about the essential meaninglessness of our lives, and — especially — our time spent on reading yet another list of ten things we should know.
  • anonymous on 17 Jun 11
     
    Basically, we like numbers and bloggers have been told for years to create titles like that to generate hits. But, there's more. By Malcolm MacIver (at Science Not Fiction) in Discover Magazine.
anonymous

Leap Seconds May Hit a Speed Bump - 1 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

time longnow astronomy

shared by anonymous on 17 Jun 11 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • In order to keep the time determined by Earth's motion in line with the seconds measured by atomic clocks, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service inserts "leap seconds" into the calendar. But leap seconds may fall out of favor after next year's World Radiocommunication Conference
  • the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses the resonant frequency of cesium-133 atoms in the NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock to keep time so accurately that even if it ran for 60 million years, NIST-F1 wouldn't drop or add a single second.
  • atomic clocks are actually more stable than Earth's orbit—to keep clocks here synched up with the motion of celestial bodies, timekeepers have to add leap seconds.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Getting rid of leap seconds would certainly make it easier to calculate UTC, but this measure would also decouple astronomical time from civil time: The time measured by atomic clocks would gradually diverge from the time counted out by the movement of Earth through space.
  • After hundreds of years of letting planetary and lunar motion define time, we will shrink our scale, and let atoms determine it instead.
  • anonymous on 17 Jun 11
     
    "For most of human history, we have defined time through the movements of planets and stars. One day is the time it takes the Earth to rotate about its axis, one year the duration of a single orbit about the sun. But in January 2012, the way we think of time may change."
anonymous

Ultimaker: There's a New 3D Printer in Town - 0 views

blog.makezine.com/...-a-new-3d-printer-in-town.html

technology 3d printer

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    The new Ultimaker 3D printer made in the Netherlands has arrived in the US. The machine, which prints bigger and faster than MakerBot printers, was created by three Dutch makers who met at the Fab Lab in Utrecht, Holland two years ago.
anonymous

FAA Shutdown Costs Could Exceed $1.2 Billion - 0 views

www.npr.org/...hutdown-could-cost-1-2-billion

partisan politics budget

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • After last night's vote on the debt ceiling compromise, the House adjourned for the summer but left nearly 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration employees, who have been furloughed because of a funding impasse, in limbo.
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 11
     
    "The political impasses is about Republican demands to cut $16.5 million from rural air service subsidies. But The Associated Press reports that during the 10-day shutdown, the government has lost more than $250 million and it stands to lose more than $1 billion in revenue from uncollected airfare taxes."
anonymous

Magritte's Smile - 0 views

boympartners.blogspot.com/...magrittes-smile.html

blog longnow art

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 11
     
    "In our design field we often talk about the future, about the world in 2030 or 2050. Some really far-fetching future experts can venture into the year 2100 or maybe even 2500. I think, only once I read some science fiction, which took place around the Year 7000. It was pretty weird stuff already.  But 192370?" From Oh Boym!
anonymous

Ian Bogost - Gamification is Bullshit - 0 views

www.bogost.com/...gamification_is_bullshit.shtml

videogames gaming

shared by anonymous on 08 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit.
  • Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.
  • For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn't matter for bullshitters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.
  • Exploitationware captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.
  • anonymous on 08 Aug 11
     
    "In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym-albeit a somewhat vulgar one-for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth." By Ian Bogost
anonymous

The Core Ideas of Science - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...the-core-ideas-of-science

layscience discover

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Here’s the web page for the report, a summary (pdf), and the report itself (pdf, free after you register).
  • The first category is “Scientific and Engineering Practices,” and includes such laudable concepts as ” Analyzing and interpreting data.”
  • The second category is “Crosscutting Concepts That Have Common Application Across Fields,” by which they mean things like “Scale, proportion, and quantity” or ” Stability and change.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The third category is the nitty-gritty, “Core Ideas in Four Disciplinary Areas,” namely “Physical Sciences,” “Life Sciences,” “Earth and Space Sciences,” and “Engineering, Technology, and the Applications of Science.”
  • Whether or not these concepts and the grander conceptual scheme actually turn out to be useful will depend much more on implementation than on this original formulation. The easy part is over, in other words. The four ideas above seem vague at first glance, but they are spelled out in detail in the full report, with many examples and very specific benchmarks.
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    "A National Academy of Sciences panel, chaired by Helen Quinn, has released a new report that seeks to identify 'the key scientific practices, concepts and ideas that all students should learn by the time they complete high school.'" Conspicuously missing from Discover writeup: methodology. I'd pair that with critical thinking. Are either of those prime requirements, yet?
anonymous

Drew Westen's Nonsense - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...drew-westens-nonsense

politics u.s. geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 08 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Westen locates Obama's inexplicable failure to properly use his storytelling power in some deep-rooted aversion to conflict. He fails to explain why every president of the postwar era has compromised, reversed, or endured the total failure of his domestic agenda.
  • Yes, even George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan infuriated their supporters by routinely watering down their agenda or supporting legislation utterly betraying them, and making rhetorical concessions to the opposition.
  • First, Roosevelt did not take office "in similar circumstances." He took office three years into the Great Depression, after the economy had bottom out, and immediately presided over rapid economic growth (unemployment plunged from a high of 24.9% in 1933 to 14.3% in 1937.)
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • As you can see, Roosevelt generally enjoyed broad public support despite having no success at persuading Americans to share his Keynesian view.
  • Roosevelt's fortunes are a testament to the degree to which political conditions are shaped by the state of the economy.
  • Obama took office at the cusp of a massive worldwide financial crisis that was bound to inflict severe damage on himself and his party. That he faced such difficult circumstances does not absolve him of blame for any failures. It sets the bar lower, but the bar still exists. How should we judge Obama against it?
  • I would argue that both the legislative record of 2009-2010 and Obama's personal popularity level exceed the expectation level -- facing worse economic conditions than the last two Democratic presidents at a similar juncture, Obama is far more popular than Jimmy Carter and nearly as popular as Bill Clinton, and vastly more accomplished than both put together.
  • He blames Obama for the insufficiently large stimulus without even mentioning the role of Senate moderate Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass it, in weakening the stimulus.
  • A foreign reader unfamiliar with our political system would come away from Westen's op-ed believing Obama writes laws by fiat.
  • In fact, the budget agreement does not include any entitlement cuts. It consists of cuts to domestic discretionary (i.e., non-entitlement spending.)
  • Likewise, he implies that Obama supported the undermining of the coverage expansion in his health care reform by cutting Medicaid
  • This is also totally false. The budget agreement contains no cuts to Medicaid or to state budgets. The automatic cuts that would go in effect should Congress fail to agree on a second round of deficit reduction exempt Medicaid.
  • Westen is apparently unaware, to take one example, that Obama repeatedly and passionately argued for universal coverage.
  • If even a professional follower of political rhetoric like Westen never realized basic, repeated themes of Obama's speeches and remarks, how could presidential rhetoric -- sorry, "storytelling" -- be anywhere near as important as he claims? The clear reality is that Americans pay hardly any attention to what presidents say, and what little they take in, they forget almost immediately. Even Drew Westen.
  • anonymous on 08 Aug 11
     
    "Westen's op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science."
anonymous

USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...x-2011-keynote-network-se.html

whimsy technology longnow

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.
  • The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?
  • a few basic assumptions about the future
  • ...82 more annotations...
  • it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.
  • The idea of an AI singularity
  • the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men.
  • if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.
  • at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down
  • My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.
  • We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.
  • engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems
  • Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.
  • without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.
  • if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.
  • we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology
  • We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.
  • it’s quite likely that within another century the mechanisms underlying cellular senescence will be understood and treatable like other inborn errors of metabolism
  • another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.
  • Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide
  • Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it
  • but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent.
  • there are problems
  • . In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years
  • Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies
  • The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents
  • Finally, representative democracy scales up badly
  • Nor are governments as important as they used to be.
  • the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.
  • we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.
  • At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.
  • The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.
  • Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.
  • a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa
  • In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.
  • by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.
  • And let me say, before I do, that the picture I just painted – of the world circa 2061, which is to say of the starting point from which the world of 2561 will evolve – is bunk.
  • It’s a normative projection
  • I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.
  • And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.
  • Let’s imagine that, circa 1961 – just fifty years ago – a budding Nikolai Tesla or Bill Packard somewhere in big-city USA is tinkering in his garage and succeeds in building a time machine. Being adventurous – but not too adventurous – he sets the controls for fifty years in the future, and arrives in downtown San Francisco. What will he see, and how will he interpret it?
  • a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar
  • Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted
  • Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions
  • He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.
  • But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves
  • The outward shape of the future contains the present and the past, embedded within it like flies in amber.
  • Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings
  • But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks
  • Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.
  • The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.
  • Let me take mobile phones as an example. They let people talk to one another – that much is obvious. What is less obvious is that for the first time the telephone network connects people, not places
  • For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.
  • to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house
  • The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.
  • We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.
  • So let me start by trying to predict the mobile internet of 2061.
  • the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication
  • funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.
  • These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.
  • This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian
  • the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?
  • Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.
  • wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.
  • What can you do with 2 terabits per second per human being on the planet?
  • One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.
  • the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.
  • Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.
  • Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.
  • The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
  • if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.
  • whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.
  • at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.
  • We’re currently living through a period in genomics research that is roughly equivalent to the early 1960s in computing.
  • In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.
  • full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.
  • Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.
  • These are for the most part commensal organisms – they live in our guts and predigest our food, or on our skin – and they play a significant role in the functioning of our immune system.
  • Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.
  • A second crisis we face is that of cancer
  • we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.
  • If our metagenomic environment is routinely included in lifelogs, we have the holy grail of epidemiology within reach; the ability to exhaustively track the spread of pathogens and identify how they adapt to their host environment, right down to the level of individual victims.
  • In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.
  • With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.
  • the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.
  • So, to summarize: we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls.
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 11
     
    "Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security." A fun read by Charlie Stoss."
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    I feel like cancer may be a bit played up. I freak out more about dementia.
anonymous

P.J. O'Rourke: Atlas Shrugged. And So Did I. - Ideas Market - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...atlas-shrugged-and-so-did-i

shared by anonymous on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • It’s the plain folks, not a Taggart/Rearden elite, whose prospects and opportunities are stolen by corrupt school systems, health-care rationing, public employee union extortions, carbon-emissions payola and deficit-debt burden graft.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Apr 11
       
      Ha ha ha. PJ is a hoot. Sure, he dabbles in ignoramosity (is that a word), but he's still a goddamn hoot.
  • anonymous on 11 Apr 11
     
    "Atlas shrugged. And so did I. The movie version of Ayn Rand's novel treats its source material with such formal, reverent ceremoniousness that the uninitiated will feel they've wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe."
anonymous

The Absolute Moron's Guide to Paul Ryan's Budget Plan - 0 views

nymag.com/..._ryans_medicare_plan_in_a.html

shared by anonymous on 06 Apr 11 - Cached
  • personally saving money will not help reduce the debt. And while you're right that scaling back government spending should require everyone to sacrifice, this plan isn't asking for everyone to sacrifice. For example, changes in Medicare will only affect people currently 55 years old or younger. Everyone older than that — people who vote a lot, coincidentally — doesn't have to worry about affording health insurance.
  • Ryan's plan is apparently supposed to herald in an unheard-of unemployment rate of 2.8 percent, which the country hasn't seen since the early fifties. As Paul Krugman writes, "If Obama tried to claim that his policies would achieve anything like this, he’d be laughed out of office."
  • anonymous on 06 Apr 11
     
    "There's going to be a lot of talk now and in the future about exactly what Republican congressman Paul Ryan's plan to reduce the national debt would entail and the consequences of such policies. Since it's no fun listening to conversations you don't understand, we've put together an FAQ for those of you who are not just kind of confused, but utterly, hopelessly clueless about what Ryan's proposals are about."
anonymous

Looking Closer » Blog Archive » Give us somebody we can blast into pieces! - 0 views

lookingcloser.org/...ebody-we-can-blast-into-pieces

generations

shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 11 - Cached
  • We’re seeing more and more movies that suggest that the world is in crisis, and that our methods for saving it are failing. We’re looking for hope in all the old familiar places, and those stories are starting to seem unsatisfying.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 11
     
    "We're seeing more and more movies that suggest that the world is in crisis, and that our methods for saving it are failing. We're looking for hope in all the old familiar places, and those stories are starting to seem unsatisfying. It used to be that we could find catharsis by demonizing another culture and making them the enemy. But globalization, technology, and an increasingly multicultural America have brought us into closer relationship with people who are different from us. It's harder for American storytellers to make scapegoats out of people who are different than us. We used to cast Russians and Japanese and Iraqis as "the Enemy." Now, we're more careful. We've learned that it's dangerous and foolish to portray another culture as thoroughly corrupt. And we're coming to see that Americans can be as corrupt as the worst of them."
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